Claude Simon

French novelist (1913–2005), Nobel Prize in Literature 1985. In the wiki's context, the literary source of Merleau-Ponty's expression "flesh of the world" — MP explicitly cites Simon's Le Vent (1957), p. 98 in the 1961 course "Cartesian Ontology and Ontology Today": "we are flesh, within the 'flesh of the world.'"

MP discovers Simon's "profound novelty" in the 1960-61 courses, where he devotes several sessions to Simon's work alongside Proust and Claudel. Simon's literary technique — superimposition of erotic, maternal, and mortal flesh; "transparent presences without contours"; "everything as a kind of englobing, a kind of magma" — provides MP with a literary model for intercorporeity and promiscuity. Simon's descriptions of carnal space in L'Herbe and La Route des Flandres illustrate the body schema's capacity for extension into the world: "nested space, vegetative space, like that of the bud's power, space of proliferation, akin to our flesh."

However, de Saint Aubert argues that MP's reading of Simon is more self-serving than exegetical — Simon's "profound novelty" is "immediately co-opted into the service of Merleau-Ponty's own thought." The "promiscuity of birth and love and death" that Simon depicts is richer and darker than MP's reading acknowledges.

The Rose Motif: Simon, Mallarmé, Silesius

In the 1961 course *The Possibility of Philosophy*, Simon's novels join two other "without why" registers through the recurring figure of the rose. Simon's character Rose — whose "flesh of Rose: flesh of woman, that is, mother, that is, containing the human-witness" (new-raw line 2260) — is the carnal passage of birth, love, and death; "coming to the age given to him by Rose's death" (2262). The "boat that silently goes from one branch of the rosebush to the other" (2106) echoes Mallarmé's "rose absent from any bouquet" (Course 1, line 539) through the figure of a rose marked by absence or passage. Both are "without why" in different senses — Mallarmé's rose without referent (linguistic), Simon's Rose without having-to-have-been (narrative-carnal) — and both echo Heidegger's citation of Silesius's "rose without why" (1101-1118, see nonphilosophy's ground/soil motif): the rose as groundless emergence. The three registers — linguistic, ontological, narrative-carnal — are bound in MP's reading by the single figure of the rose. This cross-register binding is a motif in the technical sense: weight lies in the recurrence, not in the depth at any one site. (See the motif-tracker extraction note for full attestations and weight assessment.)

Connections

  • is the literary source of the "flesh of the world" expression in flesh-as-element
  • his descriptions illustrate intercorporeity and promiscuity
  • is read by MP alongside Proust and Claudel in the 1961 courses
  • shares the rose motif with Mallarmé's "rose absent from any bouquet" and Silesius/Heidegger's "rose without why" — the figure binds three registers of "without why" (linguistic / ontological / carnal) in *The Possibility of Philosophy*

The Five Notes (1960)

The 1960 Five Notes on Claude Simon (originally Méditations 1961-62, posthumous; included as Chapter 15 of merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues) are MP's most concentrated set of working notes on Simon. They date from October 1960–March 1961 — the last year of MP's life. Five short fragments, each on a separate page in the original publication, written in MP's V&I-working-note register: aphoristic, fragmentary, suggestive.

  • Note #1 (October 21, 1960): "To see is to be granted the permission to not think the thing, since it is already seen." Vision as "thought-screen" — Vorhabe and sedimentation; "sensorial vision is the vision of a visionary." Cites Simon's interview with Lettres françaises on the genesis of La Route des Flandres.
  • Note #2 (October 1960): On Simon and Butor (present participle, interrupted sentences, vocative). New novelistic intermediary modes ("a first-second person singular") intelligible only "if Speech [la Parole] is the circle." Polemic against Sartrean ipseity-as-nihilation.
  • Note #3 (November 1960): The book conceived as "a picture . . . not perspectively, as in the event of a concept, but as a countryside." The scene "screens" (Freudian sense) what lies behind it. Vorhabe — "a sedimentation to be described in the imagination no less than in Perception." strata. Archaeology of thought (the explicit pre-Foucauldian formulation).
  • Note #4 (December 19, 1960): Speaking vs writing. "Someone who speaks is someone who has opinions, judgments . . . while one who writes is one who feels and lives." But the felt/lived "is not an immediate given" — work makes what is felt actually speak.
  • Note #5 (March 1961): The red of the artillery uniform in La Route des Flandres. The textural quality of color as carrier of "signifying virtue." Experience invoked by "this or that fetish, a fetish which intercedes on its own behalf." Rejection of Verschmelzung (Husserlian fusion) as the right model.

The Five Notes confirm Simon as a primary (not just illustrative) MP-source for the late ontology of vision, imagination, language, and writing.

Sources

  • johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Ch 2 (de Saint Aubert): "Claude Simon's 'Profound Novelty'" and "The Flesh of the World: Impasses" sections
  • merleau-ponty-1992-texts-and-dialogues — Chapter 15 ("Five Notes on Claude Simon," 1960; original Méditations 4 [1961–62]), pp. 164–67. Translation by Hugh J. Silverman. The aphoristic-fragmentary register continuous with V&I working notes; primary attestation for brute being / vision-as-thought-screen / archaeology of thought (pre-Foucault) / fetish-mediation registers.